- Yummy Version 1.0.3 – New minor release of Yummy, my Delicious.com client for iPhone. Fix for something that took me two weeks to track down, an annoying edge condition I found when editing bookmarks under certain conditions and a problem that Apple rejected the original binary for.
- Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard – Sounds almost plausible…
- Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility – Fascinating.
Tag Archives: iphone
My del.icio.us bookmarks for December 17th through December 30th
- Market Yourself An iParadigm – "The part I love the most is that the people making the 'just market your app!' comment have no real idea how much effective marketing costs. Oh sure, you can go far on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, but it all pales in comparison to even a small banner graphic in the App Store." Making your application visible is hard.
- Matthew Alexander on Torture – Nice examples of why torture doesn't work. Worth reading the linked articles.
- Robbery suspect left his address – "Chicago police have arrested a man who allegedly robbed a bank using a threatening note written on the back of his own pay cheque." Brilliant.
- Reliving Cuba's revolution – Interesting to see this on "film." They wouldn't let us take cameras up there when I visited in 2004. (Plenty of other pictures of Cuba on ZX81.org.uk though!)
- What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting – "Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light." I worked on text messaging software back in the late nineties and, at least for GSM, is absolutely true.
- Internet sites could be given 'cinema-style age ratings', Culture Secretary says – "Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, [Andy Burnham, British Culture Secretary confirms]." The government still seems not to understand how the internet works. If implemented, this will basically result in a system that's easy to circumvent and is paid for with higher ISP connection fees. We all lose.
- Happy Birthday Earthrise – "Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Isn't that something…" Still very much awe-inspiring even forty years later.
- Fearless: Apple's Macworld Expo exit is part of its DNA – "In Apple's estimation, the best time to kill off a successful product or brand is 'as soon as possible.' Dropping a winner means creating a new winner to replace it, and that's exactly what Apple has decided it must do to be successful: create great new products again and again."
- If programming languages were religions… – Apparently I'm into Voodoo and Taoism…
Growing Up in Public
What do Britney Spears and Yummy, my iPhone Delicious.com client, have in common? If you had asked me a few months ago I would have said nothing but I’d have been wrong. No, they both have had to grow up in public.
For a version 1.0 product, Yummy seemed solid to me. It was fast, coped will all my bookmarks and had the ability to add, edit and delete entries. I didn’t think that this would remain as a unique feature for as long as it has, but hey, that’s a bonus.
Within a few days I had exceeded what I had expected to sell and received positive feedback on the iTunes store. But not long after that I also received my first bug report.
This turned out to be an odd one. It crashed early on while starting up and downloading all the bookmarks for the first time. My first guess — incorrect as it turned out — was that it was running out of memory. It took some investigation with the help of a very kind end-user to discover that… Delicious allows technically invalid URLs. By that I mean both that they don’t follow web standards and, worse, that it’s not even possible to open them in Mobile Safari.
I don’t feel so bad about not spotting that one during testing, although I should have put in more error handling to spot various “impossible” events and make sure that it didn’t crash. The reason I mention it is to give an idea of the kind of things that happen in “real life.”
But my biggest mistake has been assuming that I am a typical user of Delicious. I thought a few hundred bookmarks was a lot but I now realise that I was wrong. I have some users with over a thousand bookmarks and have read about another with nearly ten times that ((I confess to being a little sceptical about some claims. At some points it becomes a bit of a pissing competition.)).
The exact number of bookmarks that you can store depends on a number of variables, such as the length of the URL, title and notes, the number of tags, the iPhone operating system ((Upgrading from version 2.0 to 2.1 tipped at least one user over the edge, and many developers do not get previews of new versions.)) and a bunch of other details outside my control. Looking at the reviews on iTunes I believe a few people had more than whatever that limit is. Unfortunately the error handling was lacking, resulting in Yummy crashing rather than an inconvenient but understandable error message ((I’ve not got to the bottom of this one yet. It seems that, sometimes, you can only spot a bad memory allocation by noting that an otherwise mandatory field is missing.)).
Version 1.0.2 was actually a big release in terms of the amount of code changed, if not in terms of visible functionality (which is why it was such a small change in the version number). Under the hood, though, I dramatically increased the number of bookmarks that Yummy could handle. However it was starting to become clear that the internal architecture was holding me back. Further increasing the number of usable bookmarks would be hard, if not impossible, without seriously degrading performance and some new features that I wanted to add would end up in a nasty tangle of unmaintainable code.
I decided to take a step back and fix the structure of the code. For much of the time since the last formal release, Yummy has been, metaphorically speaking, in pieces on the floor. Most of those pieces have now been polished and reassembled, and it’s now working well enough that I have replaced the copy of 1.0.2 that I have been using day-to-day on my own iPhone with the development version.
This is a long way of saying that there is a new version coming. There will be a number of great new features but many of the big changes are behind the scenes. I sincerely hope that you don’t notice them.
Advertising your iApp
My iPhone application, Yummy, has been on sale in iTunes for a couple of months now and, as a number of other developers have noted, after the initial launch sales figures take a significant nose dive very quickly. I’ve been trying to think of ways to increase visibility without taking too much time away from actually making enhancements to the software.
As luck would have it, I got a “free trial” of Google AdWords and thought I would give that a try. Results have been… well, not exactly what I was expecting.
The way AdWords works is that you give it a bunch of search terms and when someone enters those terms you go into an auction with other advertisers with the same terms. You can set a maximum bid and a maximum per day. I confess that these are not values that I have played around much with; I stuck with the defaults. You then get charged when someone clicks on your advert, not just when it’s put in front of someone.
It turns out that with my choice of words I was averaging £0.33 per click. If we assume that every click results in a sale then I would say that this is on the high side of acceptable. Yummy retails for £1.19 in the UK, with Apple getting 30% and the tax man another chunk.
However that’s not necessarily a good assumption. In fact, I have no real idea of how good or bad it is. Using Google Analytics and AdWords’ built-in statistics I can see how many people visited Yummy’s website and I can see how many people clicked the link to the App Store. What I can’t see is the number of people who clicked on the ad that ended up buying a copy.
But the cost of attracting customers and the inability to track the effectiveness of the campaign was nothing compared with my frustration in penning a suitable advert. I started with the following text:
Delicious on your iPhone
Search and edit your delicious.com
bookmarks in one app on your iPhone
Sure, I’m not going to make a living as a copywriter any time soon, but given the space constraints I didn’t think it was too bad.
However after a couple of days my campaign was suspended because I’d used a trademark in my text. Now I’m no expert on trademarks, but I really don’t see the problem here. I’m not trying to sell dodgy iPhones; I’m not passing myself off as Apple; and I’m not selling a competitor, indeed all Yummy users are already Apple customers.
Writing about an application that runs on an iPhone without mentioning Apple or iPhone is not easy. I ended up with:
Delicious.com on the move
Search, add, edit and delete your
Delicious bookmarks in one iApp
They have not suspend that yet, but I think it’s a substantially less compelling advert.
So overall, it was certainly worth a try — I had nothing to lose — but for the price-point of Yummy I don’t think it’s worth paying for AdWords once my trial funds expire.
Yummy: Ready for Sale
I nearly posted a rude one-liner on Twitter about it. I was sat here in front of my laptop, browsing iTunes and slightly miffed that I’d submitted my iPhone application a week ago and that there had been no sign of movement since then.
Then I received an email from Apple with the good news. So yes, as I type this I don’t see it, but apparently Yummy is now “ready for sale” and will be making its way to the App Store very shortly. (I assume it’s a gradual process and that some people may be able to see it now.)
How exciting is that?!
Update: Yummy is now on the AppStore (opens in iTunes).
Update (2023): The link to Yummy’s website has been updated to point to Wandle Software, which didn’t exist at the time of launch.
Competitive Threat
As many readers know by now I am in the late stages of developing and releasing an iPhone application. This is the first time I’ve ever really been involved in the launch of a consumer product and while there’s nothing here that is likely to surprise any marketing guru’s, I’m finding it an interesting process.
I talked about pricing previously, but today I want to talk about the competition.
I downloaded the SDK ((Software Development Kit, the program you use to write other software.)) shortly after the original announcement. The first version was fairly primitive, with little to no support for the drag-and-drop style of development used for parts of Mac OS X programs. I played around a bit, compiled a few demo applications but didn’t really get very far. Too hard, I though.
The beta’s came and I started having ideas for programs that I might want. Initially I thought they were too easy for a professional developer and certainly something that other people would be working on.
Turns out that I was wrong. Not only were most of the applications available on launch day very simple — tip calculators, currency converters — but no-one had thought to implement my idea.
Partly as an “itch to scratch” and partly because I had no competition, I set to work. This time rather than doodling around I had a goal. Well, a vague goal. My first attempts were too ambitious for my limited experience of the SDK and didn’t go very far.
I really gained some traction when I switched to my current scheme. All was going well until a couple of weeks ago when I saw a headline announcing my first competitor.
My first reaction was panic.
My second reaction was also panic.
It was a big deal. I’d got used to having no competition, to dictating myself exactly what features it needed to have and to thinking entirely in abstract terms about pricing. Reality intruding was hard.
I eventually calmed down enough to download a copy. Fortunately reality wasn’t nearly as bad as the simple idea of a competitor. Although unfinished, my application was already more sophisticated. It worked in a slightly different way but mine had more features, more closely conformed to Apple’s user interface guidelines and provided better feedback to users.
It did mean that I had to refine my thinking about pricing. But most importantly I had to start considering when to release it. Should I trim a few features so I could release it early? Or keep going, be a bit later but have something unique? In the end I just decided to keep going. Another “me too” product wouldn’t have managed to overcome their first-mover advantage, but extra features might.
If there’s a lesson here it’s that making the best product you can is a better use of your time than examining the competition. Happy users is the key to success and improving your software is the best way to achieve that.